The Secret Life of Insects and Other Stories, Bernardo Esquinca, 2023, Valancourt Books
Next month sees the full English-Language debut of Bernardo Esquinca. The Secret Life of Insects compiles fourteen of his most devastating stories—including “Señor Ligotti”, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson award—which effortlessly swim through genres. Fans of Edgar Allen Poe, HP Lovecraft, Julio Cortázar and Thomas Ligotti will feel right at home.
“Come to Me” sits about halfway through the collection at just six pages long. Laurinda is vying for the affection of co-worker Raúl, though despite her best efforts he remains entirely unresponsive. Desperate, she resorts to hiring a witch-doctor to cast a spell. Things go to plan initially, but Raúl’s life is cut short soon after in a car accident. Laurinda returns to the witch-doctor, incensed at his apparent false advertising: “Bonds guaranteed for life… the man of your dreams by your side forever.” He is quick to reassure her though; in cases of true love, Raúl will come back to her “no matter how”.
That evening, a living corpse appears in her bedroom doorway, teeming with cockroaches and strapped for flesh. Her obsession with Raúl is such that Laurinda pulls herself together and decides she’d better just get used to things. And so it goes for a couple of days, until she is reminded that Raúl was cremated. She confides in a childhood friend, Raúl’s former hairdresser, about the stranger’s corpse in her bedroom. Although she had agreed to collect some of his hair for the spell, she admits that “[she] didn’t think it was that important” and that “[she’s] never believed in hocus pocus”; the spell was cast with a handful of hair from the trash, hair that may well have come from a number of different heads that were not Raul’s. The story closes with Laura approaching her house, seemingly accepting her fate of “collect[ing] dead suitors”.
Will Laura and Raúl ever be reunited? How will she be able to distinguish his rotting corpse amongst all the others? Did they perhaps fall in love independently of the spell, and was this all for nothing?
Esquinca sometimes leaves it up to us to decide the fate of his protagonists, often teasing us with the different forking paths a story might take after the final period. As it is put elsewhere, “what you believe says a lot more about you than it does about me. That’s the key to every story.” Esquinca’s prose is littered with these personal theories about writing, some pertaining to the role played by the reader in the construction of horror; in “The Wizard’s Hour”, the protagonist tracks down a man who has been controlling him. whom he recognises from a circus when he was a child. “I’m sorry to disappoint you,” he responds, “What you see is only a representation picked by your mind to give me shape. I’m not responsible for it. What I have done is get into your head.” Here lies another of Esquinca’s tenets: draw the reader in by appealing to their sense of fear, then when you’ve got them, they’ll do the rest of the work.
Esquinca’s stories put us on edge and keep us there; it is impossible to deduce the direction they are going in, though as tends to be the case, the next move is “hiding in a place so obvious that it escape[s] suspicion for that very reason”. The Secret Life of Insects is full of lines that seem innocuous, despite them introducing a supernatural element to the story. For instance; “he was just putting Lena in the chair when suddenly he found himself in the hardware section at a department store, holding a drill”. This seamless shift from domestic, ordinary life to the invasion of horror is contained in such a casual tone that it’s easy for the reader to not even register the transition. It is not dissimilar to the opening of Amparo Dávila’s “End of a Struggle”: “He was buying the evening paper when he saw himself walk by with a blonde woman.” Like in Dávila’s works, Esquinca’s horror catches us unawares in settings we would ordinarily feel safe.
Like Mariana Enríquez, Roque Larraquy and Juan Cárdenas to name but a few, Bernardo Esquinca’s prose blurs the line between literary and genre fiction, destigmatising labels of crime, fantasy and science fiction. His stories linger, and the miseries on display echo around the reader’s head long after the reading is done. As Esquinca puts it himself, “the best writers are… contagion artists”.
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Categories: Mexico, North America